


make me anything like you

by kinnoth



Category: Angels & Demons (2009), Assassin's Creed
Genre: "the crossover we've all been waiting for!" said no one ever, M/M, eventual gay, patrick is a sly minx
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2017-12-30 17:43:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinnoth/pseuds/kinnoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He's been sent by his Order to watch the Pope because he is an assassin and there is always an assassin watching the Pope."</p><p>Basically just what happens when you take nameless assassin from the "Angels & Demons" film and put him in the asscreed world. Complete with Templars (OR SHOULD I SAY TEMPT-LARS), Piece of Eden bullshit, and that alien space-bitch from both the future and the past</p>
            </blockquote>





	make me anything like you

He's been sent by his Order to watch the Pope because he is an assassin and there is always an assassin watching the Pope. The Pope is an old man with an old man's daily rituals, but he is a man of the Church besides, and he has the Church's rituals to follow as well. The assassin clings to rafters and parapets, hides within drapery, beneath floors. They have more modern methods of surveillance, now, but he has been sent to learn the old ways, the ways of their forebrothers. When he shows he has mastered these, then, perhaps, they'll allow him a pistol, a rifle, something other than this sharp little knife that curves like a smile. 

His days are spent in the agony of boredom. He records the old man's habits. He takes logs of his meetings. He sits in dank nooks and picks mould from untouched corners. He sleeps in the dark places beneath the earth where the Church store their dead. He sharpens his knife. He moves camp, sorts his rations, collects bird feathers, eats through his rations alphabetically, records more of the old man's habits. And sometimes, when the moon is new and the sky hides behind clouds, the assassin tapes down the wrists and the ankles of his clothes and flies across rooftops, chasing the wind.

There used to be guards on these rooftops, but they have policemen now and cameras and sensors and alarms besides. There are no eyes to catch him, and so he runs unafraid. Technology is stupid, machines easily manipulated. He was made for things other than waiting and watching, and it is the best pleasure he can advise himself, to remind himself this.

He'll be here three months and then they'll send another to relieve him. All he has to do is make it three months without being caught. 

The Pope sneezes, then blesses himself. The assassin notes this down. 

It's a minor miracle he's made it three weeks. 

The only matter of remote interest he can find is, perhaps, the Pope's household. The old man keeps a cat, which the assassin sometimes manages to lure into high places with a trail of pemmican. He also keeps a boy, who the assassin does not follow, because it was not asked of him. His name is Patrick. His voice is quiet and his Italian irregular. He speaks English during the day with a borrowed inflection, and another language in his sleep, but it is not one the assassin knows, so it sounds only like dream-talk. They are about the same age, the novice assassin and the boy priest. They share rooms sometimes, and air, and books, without one of them knowing it. The assassin likes the boy priest's taste in books. They are always mysteries and always long-drawn. The assassin finds it difficult to put them back.

The Pope speaks to Patrick, frequently, and then there will be lessons or readings, and then they'll pray together, heads bent. Sometimes they'll argue, and then Patrick's voice will go tight and hard where the Pope's damper into something slow and weary. The assassin thinks that perhaps, the boy is the Pope's son, but that, of course, is impossible. 

The assassin fills the margins of his journals with scribbles and smudgings, makes his notes, and tries not to drift. The Church is an old enemy; many of his Order have died in its hands. The hiding holes and carved-out walls are worn smooth with generations of his brothers who have watched and waited and reported the plans of this snake head. The assassin knows this; he does not doubt it. But sometimes, though, listening to the murmur of voices echoing against the chapel walls, he doubts the enemy's efficacy. The Pope's voice drones and Patrick answers back in the same words. It is the same. Every day it is the same. The assassin has some Latin, so it is not a failure of understanding; but ritual, no matter how arcane, performed repetitiously and without consequence, is banal.

A good assassin should take away from his studies that the enemy is cunning and clever, mercurial, mercenary, but never banal. Banality is difficult to rally against, to form ideals against. Banality is boring. 

He's nearly done. He's nearly out, in the end of the second month, when things go wrong. The Pope and the boy have been arguing more, recently. The assassin listens in a pile of disarray from the foot of Patrick’s bed. Rain clatters an irregular beat against the windows; it has been raining all week. 

This evening, it is Patrick who starts it. The boy wants to conscript. The Pope forbids him. The assassin has taken note of this. He took note of it two weeks ago. It's an observation squeezed just between the sketch of a wall filigree and an approximation of a parrot. Patrick yells. He is discontent and the Pope seems to think it best to let him be so. The assassin understands but does not sympathise. He too, has wanted things against the wills of a mentor, though he has long learned that it is a fruitless thing to have wishes that fly in the face of an Order. 

Patrick comes crashing into his room, the Pope to his study, and the assassin lurches from his daze, scrambles for his things. The boy had only started shouting, and the Pope had barely replied. They usually go for much longer than this, and the assassin has become lazy, ill-prepared. "Vigilance, acemi," he imagines with little effort, "always vigilance," as he clambers for a place to hide. 

Patrick rounds the corner into the main chamber and the assassin darts up the posts of the canopy bed. The assassin freezes, presses himself flat against the cloth. The ancient layers of dust stir with his breath, so he stops breathing. He may yet not be discovered, for Patrick is angry, and anger distracts the senses as neatly as any stratagem. Patrick is gesturing to himself, shouting to no one in particular in that curious language again, the one he speaks in his sleep. His seminarian robes flare about him as he paces, upon the carpet. The assassin holds very, very still and tries not to cough. Patrick does not have the patience for indoor spaces. He tends towards expansive rages, which leads him out into the courtyards, more often than not. If the assassin is simply quiet now, he will go unnoticed. If he simply bides his time, he will not be seen.

But Patrick is training for the priesthood, and perhaps the assassin should have seen this coming, because the boy very suddenly flings himself to his knees at his bedstead. "Holy Father," he says. His voice shakes. "I don't mean to be so angry. I don't know why I am. It's just I feel so trapped all the time, and I don't know what to do. I want to do my duty to my country, and I want to see things, and I want to do things. Father doesn't want me to leave, but I don't feel like I’m doing anything." He stops there, with a wet click of his throat, and when he starts again, he's quieter, more distant. "I don't feel like the Church needs me," he says faintly. "Father tells me I should wait for your guidance, but I know that, Lord, but I can't stop feeling like I'm always alone. I don't know what to do."

An assassin is not meant to know his enemy. He is meant to learn him, learn his habits, learn his mind. He is not meant to see his enemy in his human moments. It impedes upon reason, extinguishes judgement, contaminates obedience, and dissuades the ability to kill. 

The assassin does not know yet that this is what has happened. All he is knows is the unsteady creak of the posts that support the tester, for the canopy is fine, a velveteen cloth that pre-dates perhaps even this Pope's predecessor. It is frayed between wefts and not meant to hold the weight of a man, even half-grown as he. 

The first tear is tiny, and even the assassin, busy praying in every language he knows and holding his breath, doesn't notice it. The next is larger, and much louder. When the seam splits apart, it is like the earth opening beneath him and he falls. He falls heavily, lands arse first on the coverlet of Patrick's bed, a plume of dust spreading forth from his body as effective as any smoke bomb, because Patrick shrieks, flinging himself away in his surprise. 

The dust hangs in the air next to a prolonged moment where neither the assassin nor the boy priest know what to say to one another. Patrick sneezes. "Merde," the assassin replies and leaps to his feet. 

Patrick's room has no balcony, but it has a skylight as well as windows along two walls. "Wait!" the assassin hears Patrick call just as he scrambles up through one of them. He is startled into one quick glance backwards, and Patrick stares at him, eyes wide and wet and blue, but then Vatican guards burst through Patrick's door.

He's running now, as he's been taught to, but as he's always been taught that he should never have to do, because running is for escape, and an assassin should never have to escape. An assassin hides in plain sight disguised by his surroundings, finds avenues of retreat that draw neither eyes nor attention. "A skilled assassin maintains control of his environment," his mentor has told him, again and again, but he has failed in this. He has failed his training, his duty, and now he must flee.

The guards will not follow him across wet rooftops, as they might have in the old days, but their threat is no less immediate. They have floodlights now, and snipers, and assault teams on the ready. He thinks he can hear the buzzing of a helicopter cut through the air. The assassin has perhaps twenty seconds more before the machine of modern security awakens completely. He leaps between parapets and finds paths out of brickwork. His pulse thunders in his throat, even as his hands grip, quick and easy, because he is surely done for if he cannot find somewhere to hide.

An open sewer grate, just in the courtyard between two houses. The assassin skids down a trellis and slides into the gap. He falls. The passage is narrow and steep, coated in damp and grime and the assassin refuses to acknowledge what else. He crashes an open trench, heels first. The water rushes over his head, and the current sweeps him downstream. Rubbish slips between his hands in pieces of polystyrene and organic junk as he splashes to the surface, breaking for air and swiping at the stink that snakes down his face. 

The gutter is deep and wide and the water is high with the run-off of Rome's rainy season; he can can hardly stay afloat, much less beat the current. The dark and the speed disorients him, and the assassin can not say for certain how long he travels. But then, a drop, a fall of water into a collecting tank, and he's pushed under the water again.

It occurs to him, in between breaks to the surface, in the way of irrelevant ideas, that he might die here. The sewer stream rushes, falls, and finally dump him into a calm, a narrow, torpid trench just deeper than he is tall. He takes a breath and spits and he gropes the slimy walls; there, a ledge, and he levers himself onto the walkway.

His knees still hanging in the water, his clothes still heavy with filth, the assassin checks himself for bruises and breaks. It's a premature caution; his pulse is still high, masking his nerves with adrenaline, so that he feels nothing, not even the inch long gash bleeding steadily across his palm. Finding nothing life-threatening or note-worthy, the assassin straightens to his feet. He looks up.

These walls are neither contemporary cement nor modern brick. This is stonework, hand-laid, set and sealed in crumbling mortar. It is dark. But what's more, it is rough. These must be the old sewers, the assassin thinks, reaching for his torch but finding his shoulder empty of his pack. “Fuck,” he says this time, but even Anglo-Saxon fricatives prove insufficient for the chill that suddenly runs with his blood. “Motherfuck.” He's left his gear: his ration packs, his aid kit, his torch, his godforsaken _journal_.

It's ciphered, of course; assassin journals have always been ciphered, even from the beginning when they still did their deeds in the public eye. But the assassin's cipher is juvenile, a simple numbers game that his mentor cracked in eight hours, when he'd shown it to her. Patrick is not his mentor, but the assassin is surely certain that the Swiss Guard will have the wherewithal to divine its meaning given enough time.

The assassin turns out his pockets to examine what he still has with him. His knife, of course, strapped to the underside of his wrist. A loose button, or perhaps a lyra coin; without light, the assassin can't be sure. Half a nutrition bar, soggy and smashed. A lighter. The assassin's stomach flips sideways a bit as he runs his fingertips over its smooth metal edges. This isn't his. It's Patrick's. The assassin had picked it up off his desk and had spent an afternoon tipping it hand to hand, watching the fire flicker in and out between his fingers. He'd never put it back. The assassin touches edge where the top lid meets the rest of the case, clicks it open. Two strikes on the wheel, and it lights with ease. In the dim glow of the flame, the assassin can see the insignia of the Esercito Italiano engraved on one side. Patrick would miss this. Had he not made a complete and disastrous arse of himself falling through the bed as he had, this would have certainly given him away.

He picks his way through the tunnels, elbow dragging along the damp wall. His bleeding hand stings in pricks and tingles. Flexing his fingers, he tests his reflexes with simple dexterity exercises, and finds himself more sluggish than he ought to be: he might have damaged a nerve. 

The old sewers connect into abandoned waterways and forsaken catacombs; the assassin remembers browsing through maps as part of his study, remembers finding them dull and perfunctory even as his mentor went on and again: "Vigilance, acemi."

" _Always vigilance_ ," he mutters to himself, glottal Turkish syllables working down his throat. Sound advice, but little good to him now. If he makes it out of this alive and unimprisoned, the assassin vows, he will do better. He will be better. Even if they send him back to scrubbing floors or fixing tyres, he will not be so compromised by carelessness again.

Then the flame on the lighter bends and swivels and the assassin goes still. The air feels no fresher here than it did four, five hundred meters ago, but fire finds the wind better than his nose, and the assassin trusts that he is close. Imaginings of the surface beckon: clean rain, clear gutters, gaslamp haloes hovering over narrow streets. The assassin hastens his pace. He has no aversion to closed-in spaces, but he does not prefer them.

Around one last corner, and he can see the faint glow of an open space, some high-ceilinged room. The walls have long since dried to dust, even as the assassin's clothes still squelch with wet and grime. Cautiously, he edges toward it, pocketing his lighter, and letting his eyes adjust to the gathering light. One last broken staircase and he's in the room, an antechamber or mausoleum of some sort, built in a pattern and of a material the assassin did not expect, coming up from the tunnels. The floor is dark and glossy, smoother than glass. The walls flush with a strange brightness, as if the night sky shone from behind them. 

The assassin's eyes drag over geometric corners, unexpected protrusions, columns that seem to support nothing. He cannot fathom the purpose of such a place, and it may be the dark or it may be the light, but every surface seems to move with a slow and lazy life. Thoughtlessly, he touches his fingers to a whorl of bizarre architecture. It sparks. The assassin flinches back. His hand sizzles with cold. Distantly, without much sound at all, there starts an electric buzz, and the assassin dives, instinct rolling him out of the way just as a silver-blue laser leaves a scorched mark where he stood.

The assassin swings himself around, weight on the balls of his feet. His knife snaps forward into his hand. He takes a defensive position. "Who is there?" he calls. Then, there is a flicker against the far wall, like a television tuning in, and a figure emerges from the static, cloudy pale, shaped almost like a human.

"Little boy," blooms a voice, "you should not have trespassed here." It is a woman's voice, the assassin notes. Deeply resonant, it speaks Italian with an accent that may be some sort of Slavic, but he cannot pin its origin. It surrounds him like a blanket, rises up, it seems, from all sides at once. 

"Don't come any closer!" the assassin shouts. His Russian is stilted but correct, even as he suspects that the voice is sounding from within his bones. "Who are you? What do you want?"

The voice pauses and the figure blinks from sight. "Leave," it says, "this is no place for you."

"What?" The assassin shifts his back against the wall, scans the room for the figure when it appears again, just to his side. The assassin yelps and scrambles away. "Stay back!"

The figure's dark eyes study him. "Little assassin," it says slowly, "one of your kind was here once already. He received no answers, and neither will you."

The assassin has been schooled in the natural sciences, been taught the logic of reasoning and deduction, and he to clear his panic, tries to extrapolate some explanation for what this looming giant is, what it wants. He finds himself disinterested. "I don't want answers," the assassin insists. 

The figure seems to consider him. "What do you want?" It sounds sincerely curious.

The assassin swallows. He tells it nervily, "Just let me out of here." 

The voice ripples with a noise that might be amusement. "Go then," it says, and from nowhere at all, a doorway appears, bending in and out of reality like a light projection. The figure waves one of its long, hazy hands and the door swings open. Inside, there is only a consuming, unnatural darkness and the smell of static. "It will take you anywhere you wish," the figure assures him, but the assassin shies back. 

"No," the assassin says. "I don't trust you." The figure laughs. The sound of it booms around the room, rattling the angled fixtures and shivering the air. 

"I am not your adversary, assassin," the figure says. "We are beyond your petty conflicts."

"How do I know that?" the assassin demands. 

The figure stills, it's features grotesquely held between humour and antipathy. " _See_ ," it says, and the assassin's sight flashes from him. 

He screams. His eyes burn hot under his hand. The assassin's world shrinks down to the feeling of ground beneath his knees and fire behind his eyes and the sound of his own voice alight in wordless pain. "So you may better know your enemies from your friends," he hears faintly, and there is a soft touch to the back of his head.

The assassin throws out his arm for balance and flails, cutting at the air with his knife. His sight still burns with a blue-silver light. He takes two aimless, stumbling steps before the backs of his knees knock against something. The assassin stumbles, loses his balance, and lands hard against a polished floor. His blade goes skittering. Blindly, he cracks his eyes between his fingers, but his vision is fucked, everything dark and shapeless and limned in white. The assassin clutches his knees, hugs them into himself, and breathes through his teeth. 

Eventually, after his breathing has slowed and his pulse sunk back out of his throat, he tries again. His lashes are gummy from unspilt tears, but as he peels them apart, his sight returns. He blinks slowly, carefully to be sure, and then he looks up and around. Light steals in from high, arched windows, and the assassin can make out the twisting shapes of man and beast, heaven and damnation curled together on every surface. He's in the Sistina; he's somehow circled back around. Wiping the cold sweat from his lip, the assassin feels around the floor until his numb fingers touch against his knife. It slips neatly back into its sheathe. The assassin gathers himself. He has failed his assignment, and the Swiss Guard know he is here. There is nothing to be done about it now. He will report back to his mentor, receive his castigation, and after some time, with new precautions, someone else will take his place watching the Pope.

There is some cold shame in it, but also relief. Things have happened to him now that he has no questions or answers to, nor words with which to explain them. Better that his brothers just think him careless. Better that than strange, or worse, incompetent. 

He must retrieve his journal, though. He has revealed himself, but his journal would reveal his Order.

The assassin may yet be a novice, but he knows his Creed.

The familiar passageways of the Apostolic Palace are a small but settling comfort to navigate. The assassin slips behind tapestries and scales bejewelled columns with an ease and certainty he can take for granted. His hands know his balance; his body knows his weight. His bones move against themselves and there is no feeling he knows better. 

It is late now, past midnight. The corridors are dark but for what the windows let in of the moon. The assassin takes note of the movement of the guards on their circuits but finds nothing out of place: same guards, same corners, not even an attack dog in sight. 

Patrick will be asleep by now, His sleep is fussy but deep, and the assassin is confident that he can be in and out again without disturbance. If Patrick has even been permitted to stay in his room. No doubt the Swiss Guard will want him under lock and key.

The assassin finds the well-worn ledge that opens to the other side of Patrick's room. He sneaks his fingers into the crack and tugs, the panel sliding open with a wooden hiss. He fits himself inside and closes the trap behind him. Carefully, he slides through the dusty space between the walls. 

When the assassin reaches the other panel and pries it open. He fits his head and shoulders through the gap, and he knows something isn't right. Patrick's room is dark but for a bedside lamp, but the room fills and empties with the sound of light breathing. The assassin can make out his shape on the bed from above the ruined canopy: Patrick has not been evacuated. 

His breaths are long and steady, though. Unwise though he may be, the assassin is fairly certain Patrick is asleep. It occurs to him that the Swiss Guard may have already confiscated his things, but there seems to be no sign of them. Patrick's room is the same state of destruction the assassin had left it in. The ruined canopy drapes from its rigging like a lace waterfall, and the books and papers the assassin had barrelled over in his flight have been gathered but not put away. If someone else had been in here, surely things would have been tidied?

His vision flashes, suddenly, the world turning black and glowing. The assassin seizes for a moment, head curled down into his chest and breathes himself through a panic. It passes, as it had the last time, and when the assassin opens his eyes again, the room is simply dark with night. 

The assassin decides to chance it. Breaking into the Guard's barracks would be much more complex than searching through Patrick's things, most of which the assassin has a knowledgeable catalogue of anyway. He slips toward the desk, rifling with silent fingers through the low shelf of books and novels, looking for a shape that resembles his paper-bound journal. It's not there. Patrick stirs and the assassin looks up in alarm, but it is only the unconscious movement of undisturbed sleep. The assassin relaxes his shoulders. He has not been found out.

Then he notices it: crumpled pages littering Patrick's bedside stand, numbers and arrows and letters festooned across them in Patrick's tidy handwriting. And there is the assassin's journal, cradled beneath his chin; Patrick has been trying to read his notes. 

Delicately, the assassin approaches. Patrick has one hand tucked beneath his head, the other looped loosely around the spine of the notebook. His eyelids flutter as if dreaming. The assassin takes a breath and holds it. He tips one finger beneath the book and tugs, its pages viced between his forefinger and thumb, but Patrick's hand is too heavy. Again, the assassin tugs, with more force this time. Patrick shifts. Then his eyes open.


End file.
